Vizio P Series Quantum X Review - Easily Vizio's Best Yet

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everybody welcome back on Caleb Denison for Digital Trends and this is a video I know a bunch of you have been eagerly anticipating today we're evaluating the performance of the Visio P series quantum X now as a TV nerd I've been looking for this thing ever since it came out at CES and I tell you right now I'm not gonna give you everything but I will tell you right now it's remarkable what this TV can do but there are a few things that you should know before you buy it so without further ado let's do this so here's something critical for you to know if you're thinking about purchasing this TV should it be right for you and that is that out of the box this vizio comes with a smart TV interface that frankly doesn't work very well for me right now it's a little bit sluggish there's currently no YouTube app available for it you have to use chromecast instead little things but they all add up to kind of a frustrating user experience now you can get around that if you want to by Roku streaming stick or an amazon firetv stick those things are cheap and give you a completely different user interface for streaming on apps and what-have-you but if you want to use what's on the TV it's not so great for now here's the important part if you can hang out for a couple of months Vizio issues a firmware update they're gonna completely update smart cast that's their Smart TV platform you're gonna get Apple AirPlay 2 and home kit with that update as well as some enhanced Amazon interactivity Vizio is not saying exactly what that is yet and that's supposed to come out later this summer so if you buy the TV and you're not satisfied with the user interface right away know that it will improve in time buy yourself a Roku streaming stick to get yourself by alright so how about some youtube Bandersnatch if you want to know more about the picture quality for this TV that's the most important part to you keep watching if however you want to know a little bit more about what it's like to live with this TV click right up here we've got an unboxing and basic set up video that's going to tell you everything you need to know so let's build from the ground up the most important aspect of any TVs picture quality is contrast right and you start with true black so what we're looking at here is a pretty painful test pattern for a television you've got white boxes on a black background in the corners which is really going to challenge the local dimming properties of this TV we are in SDR mode right now which means that you know most of the stuff you watch unless you watch a lot of HDR Netflix is probably its standard dynamic range and this is how the TV performs you can see there's a little bit of halo around these boxes not a ton when you're on axis when you're off axis which we'll show you in a minute that changes dramatically it also changes dramatically if we go into HDR mode now the right side of this split screen is in HDR mode and what you should be noticing is that not only are these white boxes much brighter that's peak brightness determined by the metadata of the signal I'm sending but also the halo is reduced just a little bit more importantly though the entire screen is much darker the black levels are far superior on this TV in HDR mode then they appear to be an SDR mode and all of the other settings are the same I'm in calibrated arc mode were at medium for the backlight control and local dimming and this is what we get so pretty stark difference I don't entirely understand it but what's important is how does this play out in normal viewing now we're off axis about 30 degrees off center and you can see that the off axis performance is vastly different basically the money spot is good for one person once you move off to the side even just a little bit you really lose the contrast and I'm assuming the color with it the tone mapping of this TV though looks really really good and that's a signal of good processing tone mapping is basically how a TV handles the metadata with HDR and decides to map the brightness and the color with it based on its capabilities relative to that HDR signal and I think the Vizio does a really great job with that we should notice when watching real content that it's very judicious about how it juices up those specular highlights so you get a lot of pop on the screen next aspect I want to talk about is screen uniformity where the Vizio P series quantum X is performing very well there's a little bit of vignetting in the very far corners but the meet of the screen most of the surface area is very clean looking this is a great panel and hopefully Vizio has got the quality control to make sure that everybody gets something like this color out of the box is very good although if you go a little bit off axis and I mean just a little bit you're gonna start catching a bit of a magenta hue and this is supposed to be the warm calibrated dark color setting you can tune that out just by switching the color temperature to cool but I'm not a fan of that look anyway what you're seeing right now is a color test pattern in standard dynamic range and now as I switch over to HDR mode you can get a real feel for just how much HDR can do for color on a TV and back and forth one more time here's SDR and here is the HDR version ok enough nerdy test pattern stuff what's it like to just watch normal everyday content on this TV I like using this particular section of guardians of the galaxy volume 2 because it's in 1080p so we have to test the upscaling ability of the television it's not an HDR this is an SDR clip so that's more or less like the content that you're going to be watching most of the time unless you got cable or satellite and it has to upscale from 720p and there's no help in that anyway this particular segment is great because we've got really black letterbox bars going on so a good job to vizio on that if it was an HDR we might see a little bit more sparkle maybe a little bit more brightness intensity coming out of the flames here but I think it's doing a great job in SDR mode way better than that test pattern would have indicated we're seeing some good detail in these low luminance scenes here and it's not completely crushing out the background I am able to make out patterns of the trees in various different parts of this scene and again there's some decent decent detail going on here color saturation totally good for SDR so yeah for most of the content that you're gonna end up watching I think this TV does great now we're watching stranger things which is in both 4k and Dolby vision HDR here's the little ticker just to make sure you know we're filming the right stuff here and I am impressed with what I'm seeing here this is a really tricky scene that I'm very familiar with there are areas where the colors can seem kind of blase and washed out but this looks exactly as Netflix intended the highlights here are excellent we're getting really good specular highlights in a number of different areas we're getting very respectable shadow detail as well I'm reluctant to say that it's better or even on par with the Sony x9 50 G I think that TV tone Maps just a little bit differently but what I can tell you is that we're seeing the extreme high brightness potential that this TV has vizio claims it can go up to 2900 nits I think in the calibrated mode it's much lower probably closer to 1400 or 1700 nits it's using that power judiciously and we're getting a very very clean image with really good tone mapping across the board what that means is it looks great okay this is something that you have got to see if you bring home of a new 4k HDR TV and you really want to see something fantastic pull up our planet on Netflix 4k Dolby vision and check this out the moonscape with the earth popping into the horizon and all the speckles of stars here this is hard to pull off well and the Vizio is doing a fantastic job from what I'm seeing right now we're keeping detail all the way back into the very back area of the Moon there and there's this three dimensional aspect to it that is just fantastic again we've got a really bright earth here with the atmosphere terminating and then we go dark and we've got some gorgeous bright punchy HDR highlights happening there if you look closely you can see just a tiny little bit of blooming around this but not much and we're seeing detail here there's actual detail in the atmosphere that you're not missing out on so if we're talking about a TV delivering what the creator's intent was I think the Vizio is doing as good a job as any of the top-tier TVs that are available right now so if videos goal was to make a top-tier TV that could perform against the best in the industry then I would say they succeeded this picture quality on this TV is outstanding normally I would follow that up by saying especially for the price but I can't say that here because this TV is just as expensive size for size as the Sony X 950 G this year and that Sony TV is itself a premium price to television so it kind of has to compete at that level Vizio was successful though we have not seen a TV this good from that brand ever before so if you like the Vizio brand and you want the best picture quality you can get this is definitely the TV to get but don't forget what I mentioned earlier you've got to take into account the smart test interface and whether you're going to enjoy using that or not there's no built-in Google assistant you're gonna use your phone a lot especially at first to get YouTube content up on the TVs for example and if you want to use Google assistant or Amazon Alexa or Siri you're going to need to use your iOS or Android device to do that but those are not deal-breakers for people who value picture quality above all else so if we look at it through that lens this TV is very competitive if you haven't already check out our comparison video with this pitted against the sony x 950 g and put the link right up there but at the end of the day i got to congratulate vizio for making an excellent TV which makes me wonder what are they gonna do next year thanks again everyone for watching we really appreciate your engaging comments in the comments section keep them coming one of you actually put out a response video that was awesome more of that please ask your questions I will do my best to answer them please hit like subscribe and hit that notification bell so you know when we're coming out with more of these great TV videos here's two more videos we think you might like and of course visit Digital Trends calm for the latest tech news and reviewshey everybody welcome back on Caleb Denison for Digital Trends and this is a video I know a bunch of you have been eagerly anticipating today we're evaluating the performance of the Visio P series quantum X now as a TV nerd I've been looking for this thing ever since it came out at CES and I tell you right now I'm not gonna give you everything but I will tell you right now it's remarkable what this TV can do but there are a few things that you should know before you buy it so without further ado let's do this so here's something critical for you to know if you're thinking about purchasing this TV should it be right for you and that is that out of the box this vizio comes with a smart TV interface that frankly doesn't work very well for me right now it's a little bit sluggish there's currently no YouTube app available for it you have to use chromecast instead little things but they all add up to kind of a frustrating user experience now you can get around that if you want to by Roku streaming stick or an amazon firetv stick those things are cheap and give you a completely different user interface for streaming on apps and what-have-you but if you want to use what's on the TV it's not so great for now here's the important part if you can hang out for a couple of months Vizio issues a firmware update they're gonna completely update smart cast that's their Smart TV platform you're gonna get Apple AirPlay 2 and home kit with that update as well as some enhanced Amazon interactivity Vizio is not saying exactly what that is yet and that's supposed to come out later this summer so if you buy the TV and you're not satisfied with the user interface right away know that it will improve in time buy yourself a Roku streaming stick to get yourself by alright so how about some youtube Bandersnatch if you want to know more about the picture quality for this TV that's the most important part to you keep watching if however you want to know a little bit more about what it's like to live with this TV click right up here we've got an unboxing and basic set up video that's going to tell you everything you need to know so let's build from the ground up the most important aspect of any TVs picture quality is contrast right and you start with true black so what we're looking at here is a pretty painful test pattern for a television you've got white boxes on a black background in the corners which is really going to challenge the local dimming properties of this TV we are in SDR mode right now which means that you know most of the stuff you watch unless you watch a lot of HDR Netflix is probably its standard dynamic range and this is how the TV performs you can see there's a little bit of halo around these boxes not a ton when you're on axis when you're off axis which we'll show you in a minute that changes dramatically it also changes dramatically if we go into HDR mode now the right side of this split screen is in HDR mode and what you should be noticing is that not only are these white boxes much brighter that's peak brightness determined by the metadata of the signal I'm sending but also the halo is reduced just a little bit more importantly though the entire screen is much darker the black levels are far superior on this TV in HDR mode then they appear to be an SDR mode and all of the other settings are the same I'm in calibrated arc mode were at medium for the backlight control and local dimming and this is what we get so pretty stark difference I don't entirely understand it but what's important is how does this play out in normal viewing now we're off axis about 30 degrees off center and you can see that the off axis performance is vastly different basically the money spot is good for one person once you move off to the side even just a little bit you really lose the contrast and I'm assuming the color with it the tone mapping of this TV though looks really really good and that's a signal of good processing tone mapping is basically how a TV handles the metadata with HDR and decides to map the brightness and the color with it based on its capabilities relative to that HDR signal and I think the Vizio does a really great job with that we should notice when watching real content that it's very judicious about how it juices up those specular highlights so you get a lot of pop on the screen next aspect I want to talk about is screen uniformity where the Vizio P series quantum X is performing very well there's a little bit of vignetting in the very far corners but the meet of the screen most of the surface area is very clean looking this is a great panel and hopefully Vizio has got the quality control to make sure that everybody gets something like this color out of the box is very good although if you go a little bit off axis and I mean just a little bit you're gonna start catching a bit of a magenta hue and this is supposed to be the warm calibrated dark color setting you can tune that out just by switching the color temperature to cool but I'm not a fan of that look anyway what you're seeing right now is a color test pattern in standard dynamic range and now as I switch over to HDR mode you can get a real feel for just how much HDR can do for color on a TV and back and forth one more time here's SDR and here is the HDR version ok enough nerdy test pattern stuff what's it like to just watch normal everyday content on this TV I like using this particular section of guardians of the galaxy volume 2 because it's in 1080p so we have to test the upscaling ability of the television it's not an HDR this is an SDR clip so that's more or less like the content that you're going to be watching most of the time unless you got cable or satellite and it has to upscale from 720p and there's no help in that anyway this particular segment is great because we've got really black letterbox bars going on so a good job to vizio on that if it was an HDR we might see a little bit more sparkle maybe a little bit more brightness intensity coming out of the flames here but I think it's doing a great job in SDR mode way better than that test pattern would have indicated we're seeing some good detail in these low luminance scenes here and it's not completely crushing out the background I am able to make out patterns of the trees in various different parts of this scene and again there's some decent decent detail going on here color saturation totally good for SDR so yeah for most of the content that you're gonna end up watching I think this TV does great now we're watching stranger things which is in both 4k and Dolby vision HDR here's the little ticker just to make sure you know we're filming the right stuff here and I am impressed with what I'm seeing here this is a really tricky scene that I'm very familiar with there are areas where the colors can seem kind of blase and washed out but this looks exactly as Netflix intended the highlights here are excellent we're getting really good specular highlights in a number of different areas we're getting very respectable shadow detail as well I'm reluctant to say that it's better or even on par with the Sony x9 50 G I think that TV tone Maps just a little bit differently but what I can tell you is that we're seeing the extreme high brightness potential that this TV has vizio claims it can go up to 2900 nits I think in the calibrated mode it's much lower probably closer to 1400 or 1700 nits it's using that power judiciously and we're getting a very very clean image with really good tone mapping across the board what that means is it looks great okay this is something that you have got to see if you bring home of a new 4k HDR TV and you really want to see something fantastic pull up our planet on Netflix 4k Dolby vision and check this out the moonscape with the earth popping into the horizon and all the speckles of stars here this is hard to pull off well and the Vizio is doing a fantastic job from what I'm seeing right now we're keeping detail all the way back into the very back area of the Moon there and there's this three dimensional aspect to it that is just fantastic again we've got a really bright earth here with the atmosphere terminating and then we go dark and we've got some gorgeous bright punchy HDR highlights happening there if you look closely you can see just a tiny little bit of blooming around this but not much and we're seeing detail here there's actual detail in the atmosphere that you're not missing out on so if we're talking about a TV delivering what the creator's intent was I think the Vizio is doing as good a job as any of the top-tier TVs that are available right now so if videos goal was to make a top-tier TV that could perform against the best in the industry then I would say they succeeded this picture quality on this TV is outstanding normally I would follow that up by saying especially for the price but I can't say that here because this TV is just as expensive size for size as the Sony X 950 G this year and that Sony TV is itself a premium price to television so it kind of has to compete at that level Vizio was successful though we have not seen a TV this good from that brand ever before so if you like the Vizio brand and you want the best picture quality you can get this is definitely the TV to get but don't forget what I mentioned earlier you've got to take into account the smart test interface and whether you're going to enjoy using that or not there's no built-in Google assistant you're gonna use your phone a lot especially at first to get YouTube content up on the TVs for example and if you want to use Google assistant or Amazon Alexa or Siri you're going to need to use your iOS or Android device to do that but those are not deal-breakers for people who value picture quality above all else so if we look at it through that lens this TV is very competitive if you haven't already check out our comparison video with this pitted against the sony x 950 g and put the link right up there but at the end of the day i got to congratulate vizio for making an excellent TV which makes me wonder what are they gonna do next year thanks again everyone for watching we really appreciate your engaging comments in the comments section keep them coming one of you actually put out a response video that was awesome more of that please ask your questions I will do my best to answer them please hit like subscribe and hit that notification bell so you know when we're coming out with more of these great TV videos here's two more videos we think you might like and of course visit Digital Trends calm for the latest tech news and reviews\n"